Fresh Blood
by AgnesDei
Summary: Some years after the apocalypse, two travellers arrive at a UN military base in the desert. All is not as it seems, however, as the Jigsaw killings have begun once more... Sequel to "The Last Game", rated M for everything.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: Before we begin – as stated, this is a sequel. If you want to understand what's taking place in this story (particularly the odd travelling companions) you'll need to read "The Last Game" first. Also, detailed warnings: pretty much everything in frequent and graphic detail. Sex, violence, and strong language.**

**Okay...onward.**

* * *

><p><em>Salt Lake City, Utah<em>

The darkness was broken only by one small candle flame, and the silence only by the soft hiss of white noise from a small battery-powered radio receiver.

A young woman reached out of the gloom and twisted the dial, moving it with painstaking care as she listened for…something. Anything. Ideally a human voice, somewhere out there on the airwaves. Her hand moved another fraction of an inch, and _then _she drew in a sharp breath as the receiver struggled with a faint signal, catching and losing it, then catching it once more. Her fingers moved again, this time turning up the gain, and then she reached for a tattered map and tracked one fingernail over it by the poor light, searching for the coordinates she'd received.

The signal faded out entirely, but she had heard enough, and now reached over to turn off the receiver. For a few seconds there was a faint scratching as she pencilled down a few more details on a scrap of paper, then folded this up and slipped it into her pocket. Finally she stood up, wincing at a slight stiffness in her lower back from sitting hunched over the radio for almost an hour, and then moved over and unlocked the front door, taking a deep breath of sweet summer evening air with a grateful smile.

The view over the city from this mountain hideaway was undeniably impressive, all the more so for the blood of the dying sun, which painted the dead edifices in glaring ruby shades and cast their shadows askance. Had the situation been different, it would have been lit with jewels of light by now, store-front windows and street lights winking on here and there. Now, though, the city skulked by the lake and slipped seamlessly into the night like a cat in a necropolis.

They'd been here for nine days, which made it their longest rest stop so far. Never more than a week in one place, her companion had said one day when she'd asked him the simplest of questions, and he'd held them both to that pledge for three and a half years now. They'd crossed the country, up and down, east and west, their only consistent pattern being to stick to the southern states in the winter and the northern coasts in the summer, fleeing the vagaries of the climate like birds. They'd been in the process of tracking north-west, already a little late by their own schedule as the temperatures climbed, when he'd insisted upon settling down here for reasons that seemed elusive at the time and which he'd not deigned to share. Now they'd finally found what they were looking for – and, more to the point, realising that they might well have missed it entirely had they continued on to Seattle as originally planned – she was beginning to wonder if perhaps he wasn't prescient.

A small sound startled her for a second, and she looked down at her side to see that she was no longer alone on the porch. Nero had padded out to join her and sat down in silence, only the soft scrape of his claws on the boards betraying his presence. She looked down at the rangy mongrel with fondness, leaning down to ruffle one ear for a moment, which he accepted graciously, his eyes slitted in pleasure as she scratched her nails through his soft fur. She tended to talk to the dog these days. Her travelling companion, for his few worthwhile points, had never been a conversationalist of note and was even less so lately, as if he had too much on his mind to waste time in talking.

They'd found the poor beast sloping around the suburbs of Pittsburgh the summer before, half starved, stick-thin and being harassed and pecked by crows into the bargain. She'd driven them off and watched the dog latch onto her almost on the spot. He hadn't wanted the animal tagging along; they had enough trouble finding food for two, he'd said, coldly. But she'd stood her ground, and Nero had proven his worth just four nights later, when the lone walker had attacked as they'd slept...

"Come on in," she said gently, dismissing this memory and angling her head at the open door. "We'd better report this." She ushered the dog into the cabin and closed and locked the door behind them, then glanced around and headed over to the bedroom, pushing the door open with a hand that trembled only slightly.

The tiny room beyond was in complete darkness, but with the door open, there was just enough wash from the candle to illuminate the ragged mattress against the wall and outline the hulking man who slept there. She remained in the doorway for a few seconds more, and cocked her head at him, and then she moved to his side and crouched down. She paused once more to bite her lip, and then reached out.

He moved like a striking snake, his fingers closing on her arm before she'd made contact.

"What?" he muttered, his voice full of gravel and choked with sleep. Her mouth puckered slightly, and she reached out and pried his grip loose with a matter-of-fact twist before replying.

"I heard a broadcast," she said, rubbing her wrist idly and looking away for a second, hesitating.

"And?" he prompted, rolling over onto one elbow and sitting up, now much more alert. The light from the open door flicked across his face as he moved, and for a moment she saw a fiery spark cross his expression.

"Good news," she said, finally looking back at his face and steeling herself, "and, then again, bad news..."

* * *

><p><em>Winslow, Arizona<em>

"Bollocks to this."

Private Clay cuffed a river of sweat from his forehead with an irritable swipe before casting a disparaging glance around at the scenery. It had taken him roughly three days to become thoroughly disenchanted with his posting to the United States – particularly to this dull, rolling expanse of nothing much at all – and those three days were now almost nine weeks past, during which the weather had soared to uncomfortable levels of dry, dusty heat that parched his throat and eyes in equal measure.

It would have been nice, he reflected, to have been given a choice, but it seemed that the British contingent of the UN rescue mission had drawn the short straw; they were all posted to various desolate reaches of the south-west such as this. The only saving grace, as far as Clay was concerned, was the irony inherent in the situation. At last, he thought, the US had been taken down a peg or two.

Or three or four, come to that, and now he felt a little ashamed of his internal commentary. By all accounts the live population of the country had been reduced to fewer than one million people as their neighbours to both north and south had slammed shut their borders and started transmitting false outbreak reports over the airwaves; the grotesque truth was that the Canadians and Mexicans – to say nothing of the rest of the world - had gone about their business quite unconcerned as the Americans were slaughtered like cattle by their reanimated dead.

"Oi!" A hand slapped the back of his head, and he flinched. "Wake up!"

His companion on gate duty, Corporal Mitchell, was an irascible Scot, still young enough to be bearing a few traces of teenage acne on his florid cheek. The fact that he, Clay, was unable to pull rank on a man some five or six years his junior had been a source of some irritation throughout this afternoon's posting, and he would be grateful when it was over.

"I was awake," he grumbled, readjusting the set of his helmet.

"No you weren't," said Mitchell, looking him up and down with a trace of contempt buried in his eyes. "You're daydreamin'."

"Well come on," said Clay, annoyed. "It's not like we're being besieged by the fucking Mongol horde here, is it?" He waved an arm at the broad swathes of dry, dusty landscape in front of the chain link gate to illustrate his point. "There's nobody here."

The corporal's eyes narrowed just a little.

"May I remind you," he said, slowly, enunciating through his thick Glaswegian accent, "that there's still plenty o' dead up and about these parts particularly since they've been chased out o' the cities. Not only that," he went on, relentlessly, "but we've got the human survivors to worry about, too. If they've survived this long, then they're either more'n a mite lucky, or they're pretty dangerous bastards, probably worse'n the walkers. You ken?"

Clay knew, and however the facts had been expressed – he was still struggling to make sense of so much as half of what the corporal said to him – they were also, when looked at in the cold light of day, the truth. Natural selection would have pared both the living and the living dead of this ruined empire down to the strongest and most ruthless survivors.

He had just started to frame a retort when something caught his eye, and he started. "Hold up," he said, drawing his side-arm. "Looks like we've got visitors."

Mitchell squinted into the haze along the road, shading his eyes against the glare of the sun as best he could. At first he couldn't see anything, but as he watched, two figures resolved themselves in the distance, fading out of the dust-choked air as effectively as if they'd been ghosts. He initially struggled to make out any details, but as they approached at a steady, unhurried pace, he studied them carefully.

Slightly in the lead was a slender young woman with short, punkish, honey-coloured hair and wide eyes so dark that they might as well have been black; but to Mitchell, this much was background detail to the long-handled axe that she had slung over one shoulder. She turned back occasionally as she walked, addressing some unheard remark to her companion, and the expression on her face suggested that she didn't mind that she was getting very little in the way of response and was perfectly happy to do enough talking for two.

Mitchell turned his attention to the second of the new arrivals now, and unlike the woman – whose only immediately worrying attribute was the crude weapon she carried so casually – this one was broadcasting more than a few naked threat signals, all of which had Mitchell's palm sweating slightly against the cool butt of his pistol.

The other figure was a big, broad shouldered man with a swaggering gait and a pump-action shotgun strapped behind his back, and in spite of the summer heat he was wearing a shabby black duster that flapped now and again in the surging prairie winds like the wings of a carrion crow. He kept his head down as he walked, so that his long, greying hair fell over his forehead and obscured his features. As the two drew near, though, he looked up at last, and Mitchell started, stepping back a pace in apprehension.

The man's face was a horrifying mess. Not only was his right cheek marked with a vicious, jagged scar which ran from the corner of his mouth all the way to his ear, but he also wore a black patch over his left eye, beneath which could just be seen the lower edge of yet more twisted scar tissue. Beneath this devastation, however, his lips were set in the tiniest of lopsided smiles, and his one remaining eye, which was a bright, baleful blue, glittered gently as he regarded the soldiers in silence.

Mitchell was about to speak up when the woman turned her head aside, stuck two fingers in her mouth and loosed a piercing whistle that wouldn't have shamed a sailor. For two seconds it wasn't clear what this was supposed to achieve, and then a dark shape flicked over the distant roll of the prairie like a comet, darting left and right occasionally as it moved, but with a definite directional tendency. Eventually, it resolved itself into the shape of a pelting, long-legged dog – some kind of German Shepherd cross, Mitchell thought – and once it had reached the woman's side, it sat down without further instruction and rolled out about one inch of pink tongue, panting gently.

"Hi," said the woman at last, her tone bright and conversational, giving Clay and Mitchell a fleeting smile apiece. "I think we missed the signs. Is this Camp Lindbergh?"

Clay, who had also been staring at the one-eyed man in undisguised trepidation, finally shook himself out of his stupor and turned his attention to the woman. She appeared to have derived some small amusement from the soldiers' reaction to her associate, and battled down a smirk at their discomfort.

"Yeah, it is," said Clay, "but look, this is a military base, darling, and I –"

"My name's Diana," she said, dropping the axe from her shoulder and planting the head on the dirt road, raising a brief cloud of dust and causing the soldiers to jump as one man. "Diana Gordon. I don't respond well to 'darling', 'honey', 'sweetheart', 'girl', 'sugar' or 'babe'. I can live with 'miss', however." She turned and nodded at the man for a moment. "This is Hoffman."

"Just that?" asked Mitchell.

"Yes," said the woman. "Is that a problem?"

"Can he talk?"

There was a soft grunt from Hoffman, but no more than this, and he shifted his weight slightly as he hiked the shotgun a little higher on his shoulder. Mitchell responded to this movement with a sudden reflex, and his hand returned to his hip without waiting for a conscious instruction from his brain, feeling for the pistol once more.

"When he wants to, yes," said Diana, smiling without the smallest hint of humour. "And you are...?"

"Corporal Mitchell," said Mitchell, "miss," he added, nervously. "That's Private Clay."

"Nice to meet you, gentlemen," said Diana, watching him evenly, flexing her fingers on the handle of the axe as she did so. "Now, Corporal, there are a couple of things I'd like you to be clear about. One is that we have walked here all the way from Salt Lake City, which has taken a little over two weeks, so even though that's not your fault you'll understand if I'm not in the best of moods right now.

"The other," she went on, her voice still smooth and mild, "is that if you don't stop staring at my tits, I'm going to kick you in the balls so hard you'll have to go through puberty again."

Mitchell blinked. Clay, however, started to laugh beside him, and didn't stop until Diana fired him a warning glance which had him shutting up and averting his gaze with due speed. This done, she reverted to her former expression of serenity, propped her hand on her hip and sighed softly.

"I'd like to speak to your commanding officer," she said. "Please?" she finished, after a slight but telling pause for consideration, which suggested that she'd decided to play nice, at least for the time being.

"He's busy right now, miss," said Mitchell, trying to avoid adopting too confrontational a tone. In truth, he had no idea what the captain was doing; he knew only that he would rather not be the one caught between his CO and this disconcerting pair.

"Are you fucking deaf?" said Hoffman, his low growl slicing through the air. "Get him out here. Right _now_." To add to this, he unshipped the shotgun in one fluid movement and let it drop, the barrel slapping into his palm. The soldiers jumped again, but Diana merely glanced off to her side and curled an eyebrow at her companion as if to say _I'll handle this_, and, while Hoffman did not acknowledge this quiet rebuke, neither did he speak out again. By the time the subtext of this little moment had registered with Mitchell and Clay she was already turning back, looking a shade too calm for comfort.

"May we come in?" she asked.


	2. Chapter 2

"This is very irregular, Miss Gordon."

Diana sat back in her chair, hiked her boots up and propped them on the corner of the desk, ignoring the pained look from the man sat on the far side, though she watched him closely and tried her hardest not to smile at his quiet discomfort.

The commanding officer had turned out to be one Captain Kendall, a well-spoken though drawn and weary-looking man in his early forties, who was now lacing and unlacing his fingers on the desk in front of him as he studied his two visitors. Every so often Diana saw his shadowed grey eyes dart away from her own for a split second, straying either to the axe, which lay across her knees like a favourite pet, or to Hoffman, who was slouching in the corner by the door, listening to the ongoing conversation with his head at the smallest of angles.

"What's the problem?" she had asked, trying to keep her voice calm. Before they'd been shown into the captain's small, cluttered office, she'd managed to glean a few details from the soldiers, and what she'd heard had set a furious fire in the pit of her stomach as it became clear that the rest of the world had, essentially, sat back and enjoyed their popcorn as the US reverted to savagery. She was aware, though, that taking it out on the hapless captain was not going to prove productive in the slightest; besides which, she admitted to herself, they needed to remain on his good side if they wanted to stay, a prospect he seemed to be resisting from the start.

"Captain," she said, after looking up from her folded hands, "you do appreciate that we've nowhere else to go?" She waited for a response, and once again, she saw Kendall shift his gaze over her shoulder to Hoffman, and this time, it lingered a little longer than before. She had a feeling she knew what he was about to say, but held her peace and waited for him to speak up.

"How old are you, young lady?" he asked, at last.

"That depends," said Diana, matching his careful tone as closely as she could. "What's the date?"

"It's the ninth of July," he told her.

"Eighteen and a little bit, then," she replied, and this time the faintest song of sarcasm crept in under her voice in spite of her desire to remain neutral.

"I see," said Kendall, nodding thoughtfully, his mouth curving just a little beneath his trim moustache. "Well, this is the problem. As my men have already informed you, this is a United Nations military garrison, not a refugee camp." He sat forward a little as he went on, apparently trying to add a touch more emphasis to his words, and seemingly unaware that Diana's brows had dropped perilously. "We have no facilities at this camp for stationing civilians, even if we were permitted by regulations to do so, which we aren't. Besides," he went on, "I'm not quite sure I understand why I'm discussing this with a slip of a girl."

_There it fucking is_, thought Diana, savagely, and she was already preparing to react, but Hoffman was quicker off the mark. He'd already moved up behind her chair in eerie silence, and now he placed his hands on the captain's desk and leaned in close, leaving the man steeped in shadow.

"You wanna talk to me instead?" asked Hoffman, quietly. Now Diana was quite powerless to contain her amusement as she watched the captain's face drain of blood until his complexion was the colour of fresh mozzarella. Nevertheless, he rallied again just as quickly and looked Hoffman up and down with evident impatience. Diana found a moment to admire his courage, even given the fact that he had no idea just who he was facing down.

"Mister Hoffman, was it?" he asked, flatly.

"No," was the reply, and now there was a distinct undertow of malice in Hoffman's voice as he curled his lip, stood back once more and went on: "Detective Lieutenant Mark Hoffman, Homicide, Buffalo P.D. Want my badge number as well, or have you heard enough?"

"I..." said Kendall, and then recovered himself. "No, thank you, Detective, that won't be necessary. I admit, though, I'm curious about the both of you. You're not related, I assume?"

"No," said Hoffman, his eye flaring a little and a tiny sneer surfacing.

"And you're not –"

"Definitely_ not_," said Diana, firmly, cutting him off before he could go somewhere she didn't want to follow. She swung her feet off the desk now and straightened her back, fixing the captain with a penetrating stare. "You told us your problem," she went on, sweetly. "Now here's mine: you're lying to us." She saw his features crease in shock at her accusation, but this was only out of the corner of her eye; she was already looking down for a moment as she rooted in the pocket of her jeans and tugged out a ragged, much-folded scrap of paper, then tossed it across the desk to Kendall. He eyed her for a second longer, then retrieved and unfolded it. She watched him read, her face immobile.

"What is this?" he said, after a few seconds, waving the paper at her. Diana felt the last of her patience drain away, but she clasped her hands on her knees before replying.

"Exactly what it looks like," she said, evenly. "It's the name and coordinates of your base, along with your exact radio frequency. This was being broadcast over a range of at least six hundred miles, which means that there's no way it could have come from just any old transmitter. It had to be government issue." She paused for a second to check the captain's expression; he seemed to be wilting a little.

"So," she went on, without waiting for him to counter anything she'd said, "not only do you _have_ civilians in your camp, Captain, but someone has been using your radio equipment to spread the word, presumably without your knowledge. I just thought that fact might be of interest to you, that's all. Not too bad for a 'slip of a girl', huh?"

"Well," said Kendall, when he'd regained mastery of his tongue. He looked thoroughly beaten down. "All right, in that case...yes, we do have a number of civilians here. A dozen or so. As I said, this is very much against regulations, so we're trying not to advertise the fact." He stopped, his features setting. "Clearly, not everyone on the base agrees with this approach. However, since you're here, I'll see about getting you both quartered for the time being."

He looked hard at both Diana and Hoffman and then stood up, angling himself out from behind his desk and moving to the door. As his hand lit upon the handle, however, he turned back, his brow furrowing.

"I want it noted," he said, sharply, "that I'm allowing you both to stay very much against my better instincts. I'd also like to say to you in particular, Miss Gordon," he went on, turning to her, his lips twitching a little as he paused to marshal his thoughts, "that you'd do well to bear in mind that we have very few women here, and ask you to act accordingly. I trust I don't need to elaborate on that request?"

"Do I look like I can't take care of myself?" asked Diana, standing up and lifting the axe a little to illustrate her words, a winsome smile surfacing on her face.

"Against fifty armed men?" said Kendall, looking her over once more, this time with a sardonic smile. "Well, I must admire your courage, if not your lack of basic common sense. My warning remains," he added, with clear finality. His expression hardened a little further after his words, but he didn't seem about to add anything more. Instead, he simply turned away once more and left the office.

Diana's face remained perfectly placid until the door had clicked shut behind the captain, but then she swung around to stare at Hoffman, her small, peaceful smile dropping away entirely.

"Are you crazy?" she demanded, though she kept her voice low; there was no way of knowing who might still be listening at the door. Hoffman, however, seemed to be heedless of this much caution and answered her in his customary growl, giving her a single up-and-down glance as he did so.

"What's up with you?" he asked. Diana snorted. "I don't know whether you'd forgotten," she said, scathingly, "but you're still a fugitive. Now you're giving out name and rank again after all this time?"

Hoffman smirked at her. "Just a technicality," he said, dismissively, adding a shrug to the smirk. "Doesn't fucking matter now, does it? Besides, you gave them _your_ name."

"I didn't kill three FBI agents and a precinct full of cops, did I?" said Diana, her voice dropping further still; it was now little more than a venomous hiss. "And it might be a technicality, but in case you hadn't noticed, we're surrounded by the British army. Right here and now, a technicality may be all it takes to get you shot."

"I didn't know you cared," he said, and now he was radiating scorn. Diana took a step back and let this slide off her like rainwater.

"You're still an asshole, you know that?" she said, calmly and softly, as the door to the office swung open to reveal their waiting escort party.

* * *

><p>Once they'd been led through the ramshackle maze of prefabricated outcrops and barracks that comprised the bulk of the base, Winslow-Lindbergh's terminal building itself came as something of an anticlimax.<p>

It was a single-storey adobe structure that hardly seemed sufficient even for a regional airport, though it looked to be in near-perfect condition, unlike most of the town of Winslow itself, through which they'd passed on the way to the base and which had been all but ripped to pieces, half its main street blackened and razed by old fires.

There was a hangar off to one side of the terminal, and this seemed to have been the focus of some recent activity. The doors were open, and even from some distance away, shading her eyes against the glaring sun, Diana could see that they were peppered with bullet holes. There were half a dozen light aircraft parked outside, but these had also been subject to sustained attack, and one was little more than a fragile shell of black, twisted metal and melted plastic, stood up to its belly in clumps of witchgrass that had broken through cracks in the cement. Out of long habit, she scrutinised the damage as best she could as they passed the nearest of the planes, but soon spotted extensive rings of rust in the cracks around the bullet holes, and realised that whatever had happened here had happened quite some time ago.

The soldiers leading the way turned aside now and led them into the terminal building instead, and as they stepped through the open door into the shadows beyond, the desert heat was cut off as well, although a small, eager dust devil followed in their wake for a second.

The interior of the terminal was just as cramped as the outside had suggested, the passage in which they found themselves being both narrow and low-ceilinged. Various doors and signs here and there suggested that this was some kind of service entrance, though, and before she could take in her surroundings, the escort had moved on once more, pushing through a heavy glass and steel door at the end of the passage.

They were in what appeared to have been, at some point in the past, a comfortable lounge. Most of the easy chairs and tables, formerly clustered around a heavy stone fireplace on the far side, had been shoved up against the walls to make room for several low, narrow military cots, some of which looked used, though others were laid with carefully folded blankets. There was a soft click as the soldier who'd been bringing up the rear pulled the door closed behind them; Diana, turning at last, saw that it was Corporal Mitchell. He caught her eye and just as quickly looked away again, removing his helmet and turning it nervously in his hands for a second.

"This is where the other civilians are stationed, an' it's about the best we can do for ye right now," he said, by way of explanation. "The electricity's no' working, but there's hot water, an' a few more rooms through the way if you want some privacy, miss," he said, addressing Diana directly now, though his eyes were still quite deliberately averted from her own. She was about to respond with a little more kindness than she'd shown before when she caught movement out of the corner of her eye and swung around to meet it. Someone had stepped through the door on the far side of the lounge and then stopped dead in the middle of the floor, staring at their party in silent shock.

It was Andrea. She was carrying a damp rag in her hand, and even from across the room, and in the subdued light, Diana could see that the woman's knuckles were shading to white as she gripped it tightly but still didn't speak. It became clear that her wide, startled eyes were pinned upon Hoffman, who had been studying the room, lost in his own little world for the moment, but now seemed to sense the weight of that stare and turned around at last.

"_Jesus_," he muttered, so softly that Diana suspected she was the only person in the room who'd heard this exclamation.

"Mark?" asked Andrea. Her voice was soft and distant, almost disconnected, and she wrung the rag in both hands, quite unconsciously, before dropping it. Diana breathed in, slowly and carefully; the atmosphere in the room was now so thick that she could all but taste it on the back of her tongue, even through the light coating of prairie dust that still lay there. She wondered if she ought to say something, and then subsided awkwardly, trying to steal another glance at the detective out of the corner of her eye.

There wasn't much to see. He might as well have been a statue.

"I thought y'all were...I..." said Andrea, and though she still sounded just as hesitant, her tone was gaining ground fast. "What _happened_ to you?" she asked, plaintively, her mouth trembling a little at the same time. Hoffman shifted on his feet and seemed prepared to speak up at last when there was a murmur of voices from the door behind Andrea. For some reason, this galvanised her, and when she returned her attention to the detective she was looking distinctly hunted.

"Look," she said to him, quickly and urgently, "there's no time for that now. There's something I gotta tell you first." She paused, as if choosing her words from amongst burning embers, and went on. "After you left, I found out that –"

"Here y'go, honey, I got him all cleaned up for you," said a new voice. Diana's jaw weakened in dumbfounded surprise as Lori stepped through the door, head down, cooing at a towel-wrapped bundle in her arms. She stopped after just a handful of paces, though, looking up at the new arrivals with bewilderment drifting across her features like cloud-shadow.

In the silence, and in the midst of everyone's varying attitudes of shock, the bundle shifted a little, whimpering softly. Andrea held Hoffman's gaze a second longer and then turned to Lori, retrieving the toddler and settling him on her hip. He looked around for a second before turning his face into Andrea's breast, and Diana caught a fleeting glimpse of soft brown hair and wide, long-lashed blue eyes.

She didn't dare turn around now. The silence beside her was far too strained.

"This is Aaron," said Andrea, raising her chin slightly, though she looked to be shaking badly now. Diana looked at the child, back up at Andrea's face, and then down again. After what felt like a further week of silence, she finally found her volition and turned to find Hoffman.

He was already walking away.


	3. Chapter 3

Blind instinct tried to compel Diana to go after Hoffman, but in the end, she wrestled this urge into submission and stayed put to meet a few more people.

Contrary to every expectation in her gut, not all of the Atlanta survivors had made it to Arizona, though Sheriff Grimes and his wife and son had apparently lived to tell the tale, as had Daryl. They were now clustered around the fireplace as the rest of the introductions were effected, though Andrea, she noticed, had quickly and quietly absented herself with her son after the initial awkwardness. Diana didn't blame her one bit. In truth, and though she felt bad for Andrea, she was not the least bit surprised at Hoffman's reaction, either.

The rest of the civilians were new to her. First she'd been introduced to a local family: Tony and Inez, and their three teenage children, Jason, Sarah and Isabelle. The parents were kind enough if guarded – and she was by now well used to the reaction of strangers confronted with an axe-wielding woman – but the kids seemed withdrawn and subdued. Last, there was a young couple, Philip and Julia. Once again, Diana noticed a large disparity in temperament, but this time, it was so profound that she wondered what on earth had brought them together in the first place.

Philip, who looked to be in his early thirties, was all loose limbs and open friendliness, sporting long hair and a full beard and wearing a slightly frayed denim shirt. She made a quick but particular mental note of the fact that he wore a modest silver crucifix in the midst of this beach-comber ensemble. It almost looked like an afterthought, but still, it was a point on the graph.

Julia was perhaps ten years younger and, in complete contrast, was stiff and defensive from the outset in a way that Diana couldn't quite attribute to anything in particular, though she kept casting short, sidelong glances at Philip whenever his attention was otherwise occupied. It might have been simple jealousy, especially since Diana was the only other young woman in the vicinity.

She was not in the mood to talk, though, and had deftly avoided all meaningful conversation in spite of Rick's halting attempts to draw a few answers out of her. They were answers she didn't feel she was qualified to give, in any case, and she now stood with her back to the room, forehead pressed up against the cool, foggy window, staring out across the scarred airstrip as it shimmered in the afternoon heat.

There was a dark, hunched silhouette by the fence on the far side of the strip. Hoffman. Unmistakeable even at that distance. He had his head down and his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his coat, but it was clear from his stance that he, in turn, was watching something else. Diana angled her head, squinting a little, but she could see no further. Something about the set of his shoulders caused a prickle of unease, though, and she found her hand twitching, searching for the axe, before she remembered she'd set it down on the far side of the room.

"What's he doing?"

Andrea joined her at the window, placing one palm flat upon the glass as her brow furrowed in confusion. Diana stewed in uncomfortable silence a little longer before turning her head.

"Look," she said, uneasily, feeling her way through the sentence that lay ahead of her, "it's going to take time. It's come as a big shock."

"You're damn right it has," said Andrea, her voice taut with sudden bitterness.

"I meant –" Diana began, but the other woman cut her off. "I know what you meant," she said, lowering her voice a touch as she glanced around at the others in the room. "I wanna know why the two of y'all ran out on us."

Diana dropped her head for a moment and let out a long, slow breath, which turned into a sad little smile along the way. She looked up again, turning this expression upon Andrea.

"No, you don't," she said. "You want to know why _he_ ran out on _you, _and you're asking the wrong person. I'm sorry." Diana averted her gaze, turning away from the window before Andrea could muster another query; she hated herself for a second, but it was clear that the conversation was on a fast track to nowhere and there was no point in prolonging it. She crossed the room, fetched her axe from beside the door and headed outside.

The blazing sun hit her like a hammer as she stepped out of the terminal and began walking across the runway, her head down but her eyes fixed on Hoffman. He hadn't moved, and stood close to the chain link fence behind the dry grass verge, staring at something still unseen. Diana kept watch upon the detective until she reached his side, and then looked out across the desolate plain. As she did so, it became evident what had caught his attention.

There was a solitary walker standing some way away in the middle of the sparse scrub, swaying slightly on its feet now and again but otherwise keeping what looked like a macabre, unblinking vigil over the base. It was thin to the point of cadaverous, and this – combined with the fact that its clothing amounted to little more than grey rags and tatters – made it impossible even to determine the creature's gender. Nevertheless, its eyes shone like pearls in its dull, weathered face, and it continued to stare.

"It's been standing there for an hour and a half," said Hoffman, softly, without looking around.

"So have you," said Diana.

"Your point being?"

"Unless you're camping out here," she told him, "you're going to have to talk to her at some point, aren't you?"

"If that's all you came out here to say," he replied, evenly, "then you can get lost." He turned his head a little as he spoke but, since she was stood on his blind side, he had to turn a little further still in order to see her, which caused him a flicker of discomfort before he looked back out over the rolling landscape.

"You know I'm right," she insisted.

"Either change the subject or fuck off," said Hoffman, and now his tone was seasoned with warning.

"Whatever," she said, smoothly, and returned her attention to the walker. That blind white gaze, the way it swayed, and the sheer force of naked patience bleeding off the thing like smoke were almost hypnotic, and she didn't breathe out again until she heard the brisk snap of a rifle bolt behind her, at which point her reflexes took control and jerked her aside less than half a second before the shot rang out in the glossy, wavering air. She was turning on her heel before the first echo returned from the distant buildings, but then she stepped back in surprise.

It wasn't Rick behind her, but Carl, and he caught her eye as he lowered the Remington from his shoulder, moving slowly and carefully. He seemed perfectly at ease with the Sheriff's rifle in his hands and – Diana turned briefly to confirm this – had managed to shoot the creature right through the eye at a distance of some thirty yards. He slung the weapon over his shoulder and approached the fence now, casting a cursory glance out at the dead walker and then offering Diana and Hoffman a small, humourless smile.

"We see a few of 'em out there every day, just about on the same spot," he said, by way of explanation. "That's all they do, stand and watch, so all we do is shoot 'em. It's easy," he added, confidently. "They don't run or nothin'."

Carl had evidently done a lot of growing in the intervening years, and was now several inches taller than Diana herself and almost as tall as his father. He was still appraising the fallen corpse, squinting into the haze beyond the fence, but as he pushed a lick of dark hair out of his eyes, he caught her studying him and gave her a quizzical look.

"Sorry," she said, ducking her head apologetically. "That was a good shot, though," she added, nodding at him.

"Thanks," he said.

"Gimme that," said Rick, stepping around his son's shoulder and holding out his hand, patiently but meaningfully, his mouth set in a bloodless line. After a little more hesitation, Carl returned the rifle and watched as the Sheriff checked it over and then unloaded the breech, putting the shells into his pocket. When he was done, he gave his son a hard look.

"What'd I tell you about playing with this?" he demanded.

"There was another walker out there," said Carl, jerking his head at the corpse lying in the dried scrub bushes. Rick cast a brief glance at it, then returned his attention to the boy.

"If that's the case," he said, "then you come get me. I taught you to shoot in case you _had_ to, not so y'all could mess around. Christ, Carl. Don't touch it again, you hear me? Now," he said, shaking his head a little, "I gotta talk to Detective Hoffman. Alone," he added, pointedly, looking at Diana and Carl in turn.

"He still treats me like a goddamned kid," said Carl, sourly, as they walked back to the terminal together. Diana gave him a sympathetic look, but he had his head down as he moved, mired in angry confusion. He stopped outside the door, though, and rounded on her. "I remember you," he said, "and I remember _that_," he added, glancing down at the axe. "I watched you kill those things, y'know. You still good at it?"

"No," Diana told him, through a half-smile. "I'm even better."

"As good as him?" asked Carl, shooting a look back at Hoffman. Diana followed his gaze for a moment; Rick and the detective were still standing by the fence, immersed in conversation, but she could discern little from Hoffman's body language. He was about as transparent as a brick wall at the best of times, but now he appeared to have shut down altogether. She pressed her lips together for a second and returned her attention to Carl.

"Probably not," she said, quietly, and then readjusted her sights a little as a thought occurred to her. "Hey. How long have you been here?" she asked, cocking her head curiously.

"Just about a coupla weeks," he said, with a lazy shrug.

"Did you hear a radio broadcast telling you to come here?"

"I didn't," said Carl, his curiosity now mirroring her own. "I could ask my dad, though."

"No," she said, after the tiniest reconsideration. "That's okay. I was just interested. It doesn't matter." In the lee of this, she watched the boy's eyes carefully. For a moment she saw the briefest suspicion take up residence there, but it was gone as soon as she'd caught sight of it, and then he was squinting back out into the sun, gazing at his father.

"Somethin's not right," he muttered, so quietly that Diana wasn't sure, at first, of what she'd heard. Before she could react, however, Carl had turned away from her and pushed through the door, disappearing back into the cool gloom of the terminal. She watched him go with a deepening frown, and then sighed.

A soft, scraping footstep behind her had her turning on her heel, swinging the axe up, but she turned into the frightened expression of Corporal Mitchell, who was raising his hands defensively and stumbling back a pace. She flinched, smiling awkwardly, and lowered the weapon once more.

"Sorry, miss," he stuttered, his eyes wide and wary, looking her up and down as she relaxed her stance and unwound her muscles. "I just wondered how ye're settling in?" he added, though Diana looked a little closer and saw that a trace of fear was still lurking in his eyes. She turned aside for a second and set the axe down by the door, and when she looked back at him, he finally breathed out.

"We're fine, thanks," she said, picking up her smile a notch as an afterthought, trying to reassure the corporal as best she could. She studied him in the following hesitant silence, and it occurred to her, at last, that he was scarcely older than herself, by perhaps two or three years but certainly no more than that.

"Listen," he said, after shifting under her analytical gaze for a second longer, "I wanted tae say sorry. You know, for earlier...?" He subsided uneasily, clearly embarrassed, and Diana relented in the face of this, electing to come to his aid.

"It's okay," she said, kindly, and found that she meant it.

"It's just that it's been a wee while since I saw such a pretty lass," he said, and then looked down at his feet once more.

_Oh God_, she thought, at once. It wasn't a bad thought, but the understanding that the young soldier in front of her was making a clumsy attempt to flirt caused a small laugh to bubble up in her throat. Realising that it would probably mortify him should this sound escape, she managed to turn it into a cough along the way, and then regrouped a little.

"I'm sorry, too," she said, mustering her dignity. "I guess I didn't make your job very easy back there, did I?"

"It's no' easy anyway," said Mitchell, with a wry grin in her direction. "This is my first posting overseas, and when I was trainin', nobody mentioned aught about killing folk that's already dead."

"It gets easier after the first two or three, believe me," Diana told him. She hesitated for a second, and then plunged on. "What's your name?" she asked.

"Craig," he said, and at last, he offered her a genuine, unaffected smile of his own. It lit up his face, and Diana was about to respond to this when Hoffman appeared at her elbow. This threw her off her stroke, but that was nothing compared to the effect it had upon Mitchell. His expression solidified at once, and now he was edging away as well. She regarded this with dismay, but there she was little she could do about it, and once she turned her gaze up to the detective's face, she could see just what had spooked Mitchell so badly.

There was a cast to Hoffman's features and a chilly spark in his eye that she hadn't seen in a long time; it reminded her of the way he'd looked the night, more than three years past, that she'd made an attempt on his life. She fought to identify its source now, switching her gaze between this disturbing impression and the reaction it had provoked in the young soldier, but eventually resigned herself and stepped between the two, ostensibly to retrieve her axe, but also to divert some of the palpable tension. When she turned back, however, Mitchell had sidled away and fled the scene altogether, leaving Diana no immediate alternative. She jerked her gaze back to Hoffman, trying to rein in the worst of her irritation.

"What's the deal?" she asked, striving to keep her voice as non-committal as possible.

"Getting cosy with the ranks, are you?" he said, bluntly. There was, in fact, a spiteful edge to his words, and though this was hardly out of character, she sensed that it wasn't really directed at her. Some sixth sense had her glancing over at Rick, who was still stood by the fence, head down, reloading his rifle with a grimly preoccupied air.

"I was just being polite," she said, looking back at the detective. "Not that it's anything to do with you," she added, trying to match him for scorn. A faint wrinkle at the corner of his mouth told her, however, that she'd failed.

"Yeah," he said, and as she watched, that cruel smile died unborn. "Well, don't get too comfortable," he told her.

"Why not?"

"Because we're leaving."


	4. Chapter 4

Andrea sat back in her chair and propped her chin in her palm, watching her child sleep.

Aaron lay in a tangle of tousled hair and soft limbs, and she reached out, quietly, and drew the blanket up over him a little more. Despite the late afternoon heat, it was unusually cold in the room. It had once been some kind of back office, and there were still a few remnants of furniture left behind, a chair and a couple of filing cabinets. Off to one side, though, was the sturdy crib that the soldiers had managed to find in one of the few undamaged houses in Winslow. It was one of many small kindnesses they'd been shown in the last couple of weeks, and after several years on the move, she was profoundly grateful for such hospitality, as well as for the chance, at last, to be able to sleep soundly at night.

That peace of mind was now suffering a few cracks. As she watched, the child stirred, his eyes opening slightly, and then he turned his head with a soft snuffle and drifted off once more. He had his father's eyes, to the very last shade. It certainly wasn't the first time she'd noticed that fact, but until a few hours ago, she'd believed Hoffman dead. Now...

"Hey, babe," said a quiet voice. She raised her eyes to see Daryl slipping through the door. He closed it behind him with one hand on the handle to keep the sound to a minimum, and then he was moving around behind her chair and stroking his palm over her shoulder, curling his fingers around her chin and turning her head up to his concerned gaze.

"What's wrong?" she asked him, noting the depth of his frown.

"I was gonna ask you the same thing," he said, softly, stroking her hair for a moment.

"Nothing," she said. She'd always been a bad liar, and, judging from the unhappy curve of Daryl's mouth at her denial, she decided that this was no exception. She glanced around at Aaron once more, checking that he was still asleep, and then stood up and turned around. Daryl took her face between his palms and looked into her eyes at close range, giving her no further opportunity to avoid his gaze.

"Andrea. Talk to me, honey," he said. "I ain't stupid. He shows up alive after all this time, y'gotta be feelin' _something_ about that. Lord knows it surprised the life outta _me_."

He stepped back a little now, allowing her time to compose her thoughts, for which she was grateful, though her mind did not exactly wander off in the right direction. She ran her eyes over his features for a moment, and this was no easy task, given that she suspected that her own feelings about Hoffman's return were, if anything, much simpler than Daryl's. She wanted to find a way to reassure him that she no longer harboured any deep-seated feelings for Hoffman – but the problem was that she _did_, and those feelings had clawed their way back up from the pit of her brain the moment she'd laid eyes on the detective once more.

"I love that kid like he's my own, you know that," said Daryl, and now, the look on his face scratched at her heart. He hadn't always been a good man, she knew that; when he'd first latched onto their band, he'd been edgy and aggressive and, along with his brother, had created quite a lot of trouble for them all. The years hadn't exactly softened him, but they had managed to cut through his rough shell and expose a basically decent core. And it was true that Aaron's arrival seemed to have given him new purpose in life, in spite of the fact that he wasn't the child's father.

But Andrea had to admit that she'd turned to him as the best in the field of one. That decision had been easy enough before today, almost a matter of course. Now, though, with Hoffman back in her sights, she was struggling.

Daryl was still waiting for her to say something, and she bit her lip briefly before speaking up.

"I know," she said. "I don't know what I'd have done without you." It sounded lame, and she cringed inside, but he merely gave her a small, sad smile, then slipped his hand into her hair, took her gently by the back of the neck and kissed her. Andrea gave into this for a few seconds before pulling back, shaking her head.

"Not now," she whispered, angling her head at the crib. "He needs to sleep." She saw Daryl's gaze flicker over to the child for a second and then return to her own, tinged with pain.

"That really the only reason?" he asked, quietly.

"That ain't fair," she said.

"Darlin', I'm bein' as fair as I can, under the circumstances," said Daryl. His hand still rested upon the back of her neck, and now she felt his fingers tighten a fraction, as if to emphasise his concerns. She tried not to place any other interpretation on this gesture, and gently twisted herself out of his grasp, stepping back a pace.

"What about you?" she asked him, trying to avoid sounding confrontational. "Y'all sound like you blame me for this. So he's alive. So what? That don't change the fact that I'm with _you_ now, and I don't wanna change it, either." Andrea realised that there was a defensive edge to her tone now, and she softened it with an effort of will. "Listen, what happened with Mark shouldn'ta happened at all, but it did. We spent three days together and he only left me with one thing worth keepin'. The rest, everything else...it's all about you. You gotta believe me."

She relented, moving closer again and linking her arms around Daryl's neck. She felt him tense, showing the tiniest reaction, and then he unwound once more and held her, sliding his hands over her shoulders and down her back until they rested softly on her hips.

"I believe you," he said, at last, and now the guilt threatened to cripple her. She diverted it by burying her face in his shoulder for a moment, pressing a kiss to the pulse in his throat and gliding her lips along the line of his jaw. Daryl stiffened once more, but this time for entirely different reasons; Andrea sighed softly and sought his mouth, parting her lips as she did so and allowing him to tease her tongue with his own.

As he folded her deeper into his arms, she felt a single tear swell in the corner of her eye.

* * *

><p>"What?"<p>

Diana shook her head, the action born of disbelief rather than denial; she felt the shock shifting her features as she did so. She ran her eyes over Hoffman's face, looking for the slightest sign that he was joking. After several fruitless seconds' search, however, she frowned.

"Well," he amended himself, "_I'm_ leaving. You can do whatever the fuck you want."

He turned away, lowering his gaze with an impatient snort, but Diana refused to accept this curtailment. She stepped around his shoulder and then – in a sudden move that took her as much by surprise as it did Hoffman – she seized him by the front of his coat and shoved him back against the wall. It didn't even occur to her, in the midst of her fury, that she was trying to intimidate a man twice her size. Her knuckles paled as she tightened her grip, then she raised her head and stared him down.

"Don't you walk away from me, you son of a bitch," she snarled. She'd expected the detective to put up some resistance, so she reacted with nothing less than abject bewilderment when he started to laugh, the sound hoarse and scathing. This startled her enough that she loosed her grasp and let her hands fall to her sides. Hoffman subsided after a few moments more, and when he did, there was a deeply analytical look in his eye.

"Why are we here?" he asked.

"Is that a rhetorical question?" she countered, belligerently.

"Just a question," he said, with a lazy, one-sided shrug. It was a gesture of his she'd always found particularly infuriating, and it irritated her now.

Not for the first time, Diana wondered at her decision to trail after him in the first place. There was no doubt he'd proven an invaluable companion and had taken to killing walkers as if it he'd been born with a talent for it, but every so often, thoughts of her father would pluck at the frayed edges of her conscience. So far, she'd managed to reassure herself that Hoffman had changed enough to be worth trusting, and he'd neither said nor done anything to contradict this conclusion.

"We had to do it sooner or later," she said, dismissing that troubling train of thought and corralling her temper with difficulty. "Did you want to spend the rest of your life on the run?"

"That was the plan," he told her, with a sour little smile.

"Fuck!" Diana snapped, swiping a frustrated hand through her hair. "Just how dumb are you, Hoffman? And no," she went on, sarcasm eating through her tone like acid, "that's _not_ a rhetorical question. Did you really think you could just run away from everything?"

"It's been working so far," he said, and that one cool blue eye narrowed ever so slightly.

She moved back a few paces and watched him with exquisite care. "What did the Sheriff say to you?" she asked, trying for a different angle of approach.

"Does it matter?"

"Apparently it does," she said, "if he's managed to scare you this badly. It's funny," she added, with a mirthless smirk, "I never thought I'd see you frightened of _anything_, let alone a little boy. I'm right, aren't I?" she asked, angling her head.

"No," said Hoffman, but his voice was just a little too steady to be believed.

"You're a really shitty liar," she told him, "but it doesn't matter, anyway. You're not going anywhere."

She broke eye contact without giving him a chance to respond and stalked away, rounding the corner of the building and striking out over the empty landscape, raising swirls of dust from her toes as she left the broken cement of the strip and hit the bare ground. The earth was as dry as death and as soft as silk, and the sun glanced from it hard enough to blind her temporarily, so she was halfway to the far side of the base before she saw something that stopped her in her tracks.

Beyond the slightest rise in the ground ahead, the dreary plain was littered with makeshift crosses. Some were constructed of thin steel pipes, others of wooden slats that looked to have been torn from packing crates. One or two were nothing more than stripped branches, lashed together with twine. In spite of this variety, however, the size and shape of the crosses were remarkably uniform; whoever had erected them, she decided, had obviously attended to their job with care and precision.

Diana picked up her feet again, moving closer to this eerie little cemetery. As she walked she tried, with only partial success, to count the crosses. There seemed to be at least thirty of them, arranged in no particular pattern that she could discern, although they were closely spaced, almost _huddled_ together in places. Now she was close enough to catch sight of something else, something that only added to the peculiarity of things. Every other cross was glinting faintly as something strung upon it caught the light of the sinking sun and reflected it back into her eyes now and again.

A soft scratching noise turned her head to the side, and now she saw Nero, head down and ears pricked, raking at the turned earth on one of the shallow graves, his claws scrabbling busily through the rough stones underneath. Diana reacted at once, reaching down to take the animal by the scruff of his neck and pull him away before he could unearth the corpse, but it was with a twinge of dismay that she saw he'd already uncovered one skeletal, ragged hand. She slapped her thigh angrily, watching as the dog's tail curled beneath his belly and he backed away. When he'd retreated to a discreet distance, she turned back to the grave and kicked the overturned soil back into the hole, hiding that white limb once more.

This task achieved, she straightened up once more and studied those crosses closest to her. She saw at once what had been causing those sporadic flashes of light; most of them were hung with trinkets. Here there was a wedding ring, hooked over the crosspiece on a length of string. Next to it, a set of battered dog tags. Behind that one, a simple loop of silver chain, stirring in the warm breeze and catching every so often on a crack in the weathered pine board.

Diana wiped the back of her hand across her forehead to remove a light sheen of sweat, now thoroughly puzzled. The only thing these impromptu memorials lacked were names; aside from the whispering sea of baubles with which they were strung, the crosses were entirely devoid of embellishment. She moved amongst them on distracted feet, examining this and that, but every single one was the same.

"Someone has to do it," said a soft voice, from close behind her shoulder. She whipped around, almost losing her balance, but recovered her wits with practised speed and forced calm upon herself.

It was Philip. In contrast to his upbeat manner when she'd introduced herself earlier, he was now regarding her with stark, wide-eyed solemnity and – only now did she drop her gaze a little – with good reason. He was cradling the limp, broken body of the walker Carl had shot, the creature's head slumped against his shoulder. What little blood remained it had seeped from the ragged exit wound in the back of its skull and was staining the sleeve of his shirt, but he either didn't notice this or simply didn't care.

"They're all walkers?" said Diana, realising at once that it was a redundant question, but she was still trying to come to terms with the sad, lonely panorama in front of her. If he thought her stupid, however, Philip didn't acknowledge it. He simply stooped and deposited the frail corpse on the ground at his feet and then busied himself with it for a second, performing some small rite she couldn't quite make out. When he stood up once more and faced her, his expression had softened somewhat, though it was still sober.

"All of them, yes," he said, closing his hand around something; it winked in the sun before he did so. "Nobody else around here cares, but these are still God's children and they still deserve a proper burial. Don't they?" he asked, cocking his head, questioning.

Diana remained in silence for a few seconds more. She ran her eyes over Philip's earnest face, dropped her gaze to the dead walker for a moment, then turned to take in the serried crosses. He'd dug _all_ of these graves himself? She was struck by a sudden, humbling sense of his undertaking, and with it came a short pang of shame at her earlier cynicism. She offered him a gentle smile, though the gesture didn't come naturally to her and she wasn't sure of its efficacy.

"I suppose they do," she said. "I just never thought about it before. I've killed so many of them. Haven't you?"

"When I had no other choice, yes," he told her.

"There's a choice?" she said. She felt it mean-spirited of her to ask such a question, but she'd survived the last few years by killing walkers on sight, often without provocation on their part. In her experience, motive was seldom far away, and it was far better to kill the creatures when their back was turned than wait for them to decide upon an angle of attack. It was extremely disconcerting to find that the man in front of her was, somehow, prodding her to think – even for a moment – that she might have adopted the wrong approach.

"There's _always_ a choice, Diana," said Philip, and though her name fell innocently enough from his lips, something about it felt subtly wrong, as if he'd concealed an entirely different word behind it. This reaction flared and died before she could pin it with any accuracy, however, and she shook her head to dispel the fractional confusion this caused her.

She eventually left him to his work, unable to think what else to say in the face of his determination to do what he thought right. As she retreated, however, Nero padding at her side, she turned once more to watch Philip as he picked up a shovel from where it had been leaning against one of the grave markers and then sunk it into a fresh patch of soil, leaning on the handle for leverage. The heat haze blurred his outline, though, and the swirling dust picked up once more, and eventually he was lost to sight.


	5. Chapter 5

Slitting his eyes against the sunlight, Daryl drew a bead on his target, pressed the stock of the crossbow firmly into his shoulder, sighted carefully along the shaft of the arrow, exhaled smoothly and fired.

The shot was clean. There was a small puff of dust in the distance as the creature fell, struck through with the arrow, and struggled fitfully in the dirt for a few seconds before it sagged and lay there, twitching feebly. Daryl nodded to himself, smiled thinly, shouldered the bow and trudged over to examine his prey.

The rabbit had been hit in the side, puncturing its lung, but the arrow was plugging the wound. Even as he hunkered down to examine it, he could see very little blood in its fur, though there was a fine scarlet stream pouring from its open mouth and congealing in the dust. The animal's bulging eyes were already beginning to glaze, probably from shock, but he reached out and plucked the arrow from its body to hasten its death. The puckered wound bubbled for a few seconds, bloodstained foam staining the creature's pelt, and then this died away entirely.

Daryl reached out and grabbed it by one long hind leg. He straightened up, pulled a length of cord from his pocket and tied the limp corpse to his belt by its neck, counterbalancing the fat groundhog he'd picked off a little earlier, more for practise than in any hope that anyone else in the group would feel like eating it.

The sun was sinking fast, and, with it, his opportunities. It wasn't that he didn't know how to spotlight, but in this changed world that was a very quick way to attract every walker within a three-mile radius. He ran his eyes along the horizon for a few seconds in search of larger prey; he had seen deer around the base in the last few days, but had not so far got close enough to pick off any of them.

"Good huntin'?" said a voice, from close behind his shoulder. Daryl twitched gently, but before turning, he pulled a matchstick from his pocket and slipped it between his teeth, biting down on the wood. Finally he swung around. Rick had his Stetson pulled down low and the resultant shadow his half his expression, but what there was to be seen was a little too carefully set for comfort, and Daryl knew that the sheriff hadn't come around just to make small talk about game.

"Not too bad," he said, and then pressed on to the point as quickly as he could. "Listen, Rick, about Detective Hoffman..."

"That's not what I was gonna ask," said Rick, but his eyes darted off to the side for a fraction of a second.

"Yeah, it was," said Daryl, without rancour, "and I know y'all want to help, but it's okay. 'Sides, this is between him and Andrea. It ain't my place to say anything. Whether I like it or not, he's Aaron's daddy and there's a history there."

"What history?" asked Rick, scornfully. "A few days?"

"Don't matter how long," said Daryl, with a brief shrug. He looked down for a second to locate the rag in his pocket and wiped the arrow clean before returning it the soft bag on his hip, and then slung the bow behind his shoulder.

"I talked to him," said Rick, and now he looked vastly uncomfortable. "Told him it might be for the best if he moved on."

Daryl was not in the mood for conversation on any subject at all, let alone this one, and he'd already turned on his heel and started back toward the base. Now, though, he stopped in his tracks and swung his head back, giving the sheriff a deep frown. Out of respect for the man, though, he reeled in his tongue and reconsidered his words before speaking.

"Rick," he sighed, heavily, picking his tone with infinite care, "I know y'alls only doin' what you think best, but you gotta leave this alone."

"She still has feelings for him. We both know that," said Rick, his voice so low that it was barely audible. Daryl hung his head for a second and took a couple of very deep breaths. He was painfully aware that Rick's own issues with his wife – and her brief affair with Rick's deputy, Shane – were a large part of his current concerns, but he was not remotely inclined to raise the subject in his defence, even though he was left rudderless as a result.

"Even if that's the case, what can I do about it?" he asked, instead.

"I don't know how you can take this so calmly."

"Because I have to, okay?" hissed Daryl, stepping closer. "I know you always thought I was just like Merle and maybe y'all had a point about that back in the day. I know I used to be an asshole. The difference is that I'm tryin' not to be. I don't deserve that woman and I hafta let her make her own choices. Everythin' happens for a reason. We survived, and beyond that I ain't questioning nothing no more."

Rick laughed gently, and for a moment Daryl wondered whether he was being mocked, but then the sheriff raised a placatory hand to him.

"I'm sorry," he said, warmly. "I ain't laughing at you, it's just..."

"Yeah, I know," said Daryl, directing a wry grin at the deep copper sky for a second before turning this good humour upon the other man. "Look, it's okay. I thank you for your concern, but it'll be fine."

"Will it, though?"

Rick's face was carefully composed, and though the setting sun was in his eyes he seemed oblivious to this and continued to watch Daryl carefully. All at once he looked far older than his forty-two years, and the golden light picked mercilessly at the lines beneath his eyes and around the corners of his mouth. Daryl couldn't think what else to say, so he merely adjusted the set of his belt, shrugged once more and started to pick his way through the rough, scrawny scrub grass, returning to the terminal.

* * *

><p>It was a source of surprise to Andrea that, after all this time, she still felt any unease in the presence of death, but somehow, she had yet to adjust to this kind of task. She stood in the cramped kitchen at the rear of the reception area and tightened her grip on the handle of a cleaver, but kept the blade low at her side for the time being. She extended her free hand and grasped the dead rabbit, running her fingernails through the dense fur on its flank before grasping it by the shoulder.<p>

It was still warm, a fact that quickly penetrated Andrea's consciousness and had her faltering as she lifted the cleaver. Her hand was shaking, but she adjusted her grip a little and then set her sights on the animal's neck, which she'd stretched out as best she could. Even so, the quiver in her wrist increased, until she began to fear that she might well miss her mark and remove a finger or two in the process. The prospect nagged at her until she lowered her arm once more and set the cleaver aside.

She felt a brief twitch beneath her fingertips, no more than a flutter of some small muscle in the rabbit's shoulder, and she was still reacting to this, drawing back her hand, when the animal convulsed and started to shudder on the worktop. Andrea pressed her palm to her mouth and backed away a step, watching as its hind legs scrabbled at the surface beneath it, the yellowed claws raising soft, biting squeals from the cold steel.

It was apparent that these were no more than death throes, and she reached out and snatched up the cleaver once more, meaning to complete her task; her muscles seemed locked in place, however, and all she could do was watch as the creature continued to squirm.

Andrea had no clear idea how long she stood with her blank gaze fixed on the unfortunate animal, but after a while, she realised that someone had drifted into the room and was standing behind her, so close that she could feel their warm breath on the skin at the nape of her neck. She knew who it was – there was a cold inevitability about the whole situation – but she decided to turn around before speaking. As she did so, however, she found that the words she was assembling withered in the back of her throat as she raised her gaze to Hoffman's face.

Her initial observation of the detective had been too fleeting, and the moment too confused, for her to take in any details. Now she was in a position to see him clearly and at her leisure, it stopped her heart for a second that felt like an hour or more.

He was smiling that small, lupine smile that she'd never quite managed to forget, and it was just the same as it had always been...handsome, beguiling and unsettling, an air only rendered all the more intense by the jagged scar he wore. Above this, however, Andrea could see the evident marks of his more recent injury. The pink rim of scar tissue beneath the eye patch was comparatively fresh, and livid enough to suggest that the wound was no more than a few months old at most.

While she'd been staring, trying to recoup her voice, Hoffman had reached out and plucked the cleaver from her slack grasp and was now weighing it in his hand. He glanced down at it for a second and then back up at her, taking his time, looking her over, before he finally spoke up.

"Still too squeamish, I see," he said. Andrea opened her mouth now, but still couldn't summon so much as a single word she felt adequate, especially in the face of such an unexpectedly barbed remark. Hoffman appeared content to watch her struggle with her tongue until she finally squared up to him as best she could.

"No," she said, stiffly. "I can handle this."

"Fine," he replied, smoothly, "then do it. Put it out of its misery." He chuckled softly, without humour or kindness of any kind, and offered her the blade. Andrea closed her fingers around the handle, but her muscles seemed suddenly weak and strained and she felt powerless to do so much as raise her arm once more, let alone take the cleaver and turn back to her unpleasant task. She knew that Hoffman was right, and that knowledge was bad enough, but to add to the shame she could see from the smallest of triumphant twists in that cold smile that he knew it, too. She drew back her hand and stepped aside to allow him room.

"Y'all can do this so easily?" she asked, though it was a redundant question. She knew by now that slaughtering animals was far from being the extent of Mark Hoffman's talent for efficient brutality – but she was by this point simply trying to goad him. He had turned away, eyeing the rabbit, but now he swung his head around briefly and stared her down.

"Yes," he said, simply. "I can." This said, he seized the gently twitching animal and brought the heavy blade down on the back of its neck without the slightest pause. Andrea flinched at the dull crunch as the cleaver pulverised the creature's vertebrae and smacked into the surface beneath. Blood sprayed across the steel and licked up over Hoffman's fingers, but he merely grunted and tossed the blade aside, where it clattered into the sink. Only now did he turn back to her, and she saw that his features had settled into something cold.

"You haven't learned a damn thing, have you?" he asked.

"More'n you think," she told him, raising her chin. Hoffman smirked slightly in response and then, without taking his gaze from hers, raised one hand to his mouth and lapped at a thin trickle of blood on his knuckle. Andrea found herself hypnotised by this casual gesture, and her hands shook at her sides for a moment.

"Where you been all this time?" she asked, quietly.

"Doesn't matter," he said, and his voice was as smooth as glass.

"It does to me."

"Why?"

The question took Andrea aback; so much so that she looked away for a moment in confusion. When she turned back again, Hoffman was standing over her, his expression a blend of sobriety and meaningful intent. She lowered her eyes as he curled his fingers around her shoulder, leaving a faint crimson smear on her white shirt. For a second she thought of backing away, out of his reach, but the edge of the worktop was pressing into the small of her back and cutting off her escape.

"Don't touch me," she said, or thought she did; but if so, Hoffman didn't appear to have heard this and she lacked the strength to repeat herself. He slipped his free hand into her hair and took hold of her far more gently than she expected, but firmly nonetheless, and before she could muster any resistance he was running his tongue along her lower lip before kissing her deeply, sharing the slightest taste of the animal's blood.

This last sensation jarred Andrea, sparking her ire, and she twisted away, ducked out of Hoffman's arms and slammed her palm against his chest, shoving him away. For a second she expected further insistence from him, and she stood back, her hands raised, breathing hard and her cheek flushed with anger. After watching him for a few moments more it became clear that he was content to remain where he was, so she forced calm upon herself and sharpened her gaze.

"It's too late for that," she said, hearing a quiver at the back of her voice.

"I missed you," he said, and there was the barest flash of human vulnerability there to match the words, but even as she watched, Andrea saw it buried once more beneath his usual chilly demeanour. There was the smallest twitch at the corner of his mouth, the slightest movement in that pale, twisted scar tissue, but then this too was gone before she could fix upon it or ascribe it any significance at all.

"So why did you lie?" she asked. "You were never bitten. I asked you to come with us," she said, defensively. "You had your chance three years ago. If you'd stayed –"

"We could have played happy families, is that it?" he said, sharply. "You, me, the kid and half a million walkers? Diana told me I ought to talk to you. I don't think she had the first fucking idea it would go this way. No, you listen to me, sweetheart," he went on, as Andrea started to remonstrate, "you wanted me to stay. Fine. You didn't _need_ me, though, and I didn't need you or anyone else. There was no point in staying."

The air between them crackled with ice in the wake of these words, and even though she'd braced herself, Andrea still felt the cruel slash of every syllable. Her lip trembled for a second and she struggled to keep eye contact with the detective; he was regarding her with consummate coldness.

"You needed Diana," she said. It was the first thing that occurred to her, and she knew she was only responding because it was either that or weep, and she was damned if she would do that in front of Hoffman.

"Is that what you think?" he asked, scathingly.

"Isn't the lone wolf act ever gonna get old, Mark?" she said, her voice shot through with steel. Before he could react, she shook her head and turned away, picking up a short-bladed knife and tending to the rabbit, removing its paws and tail before starting to skin it with short, efficient strokes, tugging at the cool pelt now and again to loosen it from the carcass. She heard Hoffman move up close behind her, and could swear she felt the pressure of his gaze on the back of her neck for a moment. Then he simply snorted softly and left the kitchen without closing the door behind him.

Andrea continued to work at her task for a few seconds more before her vision began to blur.


	6. Chapter 6

Diana had been concentrating the bulk of her quiet attention on Hoffman and Andrea for the greater part of the evening, so it came as something of a shock to her that the first thing to jar her out of this wary vigil came as the motley band of refugees sat down to eat dinner. With hindsight, though, she realised it should have been obvious from the start.

"Let us pray," said Philip, tracking his eyes around the table without judgement before dipping his head over his clasped hands. Diana watched as Tony, Inez and their children did likewise, although Julia wrinkled her nose a little before complying. The others eventually followed suit, although out of the corner of her eye, Diana could see that Andrea had shifted uncomfortably before lowering her head, and her gaze was noticeably unfocused.

After a few moments more, only Diana and Hoffman remained unbowed, so it was out of necessity that she caught his eye. He stared at her for a second in the warm candlelight, his expression flat, and then – to her shock – he smiled briefly. This unfamiliar gesture, sardonic though it was, transformed the set of the various areas of scar tissue on his face, and the net effect was profoundly disturbing. She looked away at once, catching her breath, as Philip went on with his grace.

"Bless us, O Lord," he said, passionately, "and these, Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty. Through Christ, our Lord. Amen."

When he had finished speaking, he crossed himself, slowly and thoughtfully, and finally looked up from the table at the others with a beatific smile.

"Thank you, Father," said Tony, quietly, and as the others commenced to eat, this was what prompted Diana to take hold of her amazement in both hands and lean across to Philip.

"You're a priest?" she whispered. She watched him lay down his fork and turn his attention on her, his features set in a patient cast.

"You sound as if you're surprised," he said, with some gentle amusement, folding his hands in front of him.

"I am, actually. You look like –"

"A bum?" asked Philip, but he was still smiling just as kindly as before.

"I wasn't going to say that," said Diana, finding that she was genuinely mortified.

"It's quite all right, I assure you," he told her. "I was parish priest of St. Sebastian's in Oceanside. I was only two months out of the seminary and I found myself barricaded in my church with a handful of my parishioners." He paused, and angled his head down the table at Julia, who was too far away to hear their conversation and thus frowned minutely at this unexpected attention. "Julia is the last one left alive. We found better sanctuary for a while at Camp Pendleton, but when we heard that the United Nations forces had arrived here in Winslow, we made our way across the Mojave to find them. It took us over a month to get here on foot and we lost all but the two of us along the way, to walkers, rattlesnakes and dehydration, mostly."

"You wandered in the desert for forty days?" asked Diana, through a tiny smirk. It had been a genuine slip of the tongue, something she'd meant to keep on the inner side of her head, but she watched that tranquil smile vanish at once to be replaced by the faintest of admonitory creases in the man's brow. Diana had been raised Roman Catholic herself, although somewhat half-heartedly due to a muted disagreement between her parents on the subject, and attendance at Mass had ceased altogether after her mother left. She thus felt a stab of residual guilt, and thought quickly. "I'm sorry," she said, softly. "I shouldn't have said that."

Philip's smile resurfaced at this, although it now looked like one born of long suffering and he reached out and took her hand for a second, squeezing it gently.

"I'll live," he said, calmly, and resumed eating. After a few minutes, however, Diana found herself retracing their conversation in her mind, and something struck her.

"You said you heard the army had arrived in Winslow?" she asked him. "How did you find out?"

He seemed to start at this, but then recovered and offered her a quizzical look.

"We heard a radio broadcast," he told her, apparently mystified that she should need to ask. "Didn't you?"

"Yes, we did," said Diana, and then shot a quick glance over at the sheriff and his family, recalling Carl's words to her earlier in the day. "That wasn't the case for everyone here, though, was it?"

"Not at all. Tony and his family were already here when the soldiers arrived; they'd been hiding in the terminal after they lost their home in Winslow to a fire. Julia and I got here about a month ago, and Sheriff Grimes and his people about two weeks after. Why do you ask?"

Diana tried to think of something to say, but another fact was now picking at the edges of her thought processes. This was the first time since their arrival that she'd engaged in a lengthy conversation with Philip, and it occurred to her that his accent was certainly not Californian; unless she was sorely mistaken, by the sound of it, he was New York born and bred. Yet another point on the graph, she mused, then wondered at once why the man perturbed her so much when nothing she'd seen or heard so far should have given her the slightest cause for concern.

She returned her attention to Philip to find that he was watching her intently, evidently waiting for her response. She shuffled nervously in her seat.

"Didn't you wonder who was broadcasting the signal?" she asked, trying to gauge his reaction to this as she spoke.

"It was a sign from God," said Philip, patiently and seriously. "Beyond that, I didn't question it. If He sent His grace to us through the agents of war, it just goes to show that true faith finds a home even in a nest of vipers."

She sat back a little, stunned at these last words. It wasn't that they had been delivered in tones of wrath, but the description itself was profoundly shocking. In spite of the fact that he and his companion had been offered shelter at the base, presumably without condition, it seemed that he nevertheless harboured a great deal of resentment toward their hosts...and she was, suddenly, not entirely sure that his feelings were grounded in Christian pacifism. For a fraction of a second, as he spoke, it had all sounded so _personal_.

"I need to know who sent that message," she said, softly but firmly. "At first I assumed it was you, if I'm honest."

"Not me," he said, but a little too glibly, and at once, she knew it for a lie and wondered why. If he was lying to Captain Kendall, that would have been quite understandable, but to lie to her seemed pointless when it was obvious that she sympathised wholeheartedly with the sentiment behind the covert broadcast. Whatever his reasons, it was clear that she would get nowhere in trying to draw the truth out of him, so she simply bit her lip and returned her attention to her food.

She found she was no longer hungry, though, so when Nero shuffled up to her beneath the table and laid his chin on her knee with a soft sigh, she took a hunk of rabbit from her plate and held it out to the animal, who took it with unexpected gentility and lay down to eat. Diana, meanwhile, propped her chin in her palm and simply stared into the darkness beyond the candle flames, thinking.

* * *

><p>Still bewildered by Philip's short but meaningful glance in her direction, Julia sat and watched him from the far end of the table as he sat huddled in conversation with Diana. She admitted that her feelings for Philip were likely going to go unrequited, that if he was still adhering to his vows after all this time things were unlikely to change now, but she had still sat in a gently seething pool of jealousy as she watched him talking to the teenager.<p>

There was no denying that the kid was extremely attractive, she thought sourly, and what puzzled Julia most about the new arrivals was that they made such a bizarre pairing, especially since they were neither related nor – apparently – were they screwing each other. This last thought turned her head a little and had her focusing a sidelong stare on Hoffman instead, studying him carefully through lowered lashes.

She knew by now that he was a police detective from somewhere up in the Northeast, but she had never seen a more unlikely cop. In contrast to Sheriff Grimes, who still lived in uniform and had an air of authority about him even now, Hoffman was a mess. His face was so badly scarred she'd flinched to see it the first time, he was shabby and sullen and broadcast an air of barely suppressed hostility, and yet...Julia cocked her head a little at him now, staring at him directly since he wasn't looking in her direction.

From the start, she'd caught the scent of something about the detective that appealed to her baser instincts, though he was at least a quarter century older than her, if not more. Beneath the scars and sneers it was evident that he'd been a very handsome man at one time, and more than that, he exuded filthy sexuality. Julia was taken aback that this last thought should even have occurred to her; she'd had a rigorous Catholic upbringing that had ill prepared her for puberty, let alone the feelings and desires that went with it, and though she'd started to work her way free from the restrictions imposed by both parents and church once she'd reached the age of eighteen, her experiments had been swiftly curtailed by the walkers. If it hadn't been for the appointment of the personable young priest just a few weeks before the outbreak, it would not even have occurred to her to take refuge in the church.

Julia stifled these memories and returned to her scrutiny of Hoffman, but by the time she had refocused herself, she found that the detective had caught and held her gaze. She looked away hurriedly, but before she did, she saw something in that quiet stare that looked a lot like knowing amusement, and she suffered brief pang of embarrassment.

She was sat beside Andrea, who'd been quiet all evening and was no less subdued now, picking over her food with a curiously absorbed expression on her face. The grapevine had worked quickly here, too, and Julia was aware that the detective had fathered Andrea's son. So far she'd been struggling to make sense of this development and its implications for the group as a whole, though it explained a few things about Andrea's current state of desolation and the strained atmosphere between Hoffman and the Atlanta survivors. Julia decided to speak up, if only in an attempt to distract herself from her musings about the detective himself.

"Are you okay?" she asked, gently. Andrea started a little, jerked out of whatever thoughts with which she was sharing her reverie, and then turned a wan smile on the younger woman.

"I'm fine," she said, evenly, though it did not escape Julia's notice that her gaze flickered over to Hoffman as she spoke.

"He's Aaron's dad, isn't he? I heard that from..." said Julia. She spoke haltingly enough to begin with, unsure if she was pursuing a wise line of inquiry, and her words trailed off entirely as Andrea finally focused tired, red-rimmed eyes on her with exacting intensity.

"I guess I got no secrets around here, do I?" she said, though there was not the slightest trace of anger in her tone; her words were all but hollow. "Doesn't matter, anyway. Forget it. Yes, he is."

"Didn't you say he was dead?" asked Julia. She felt bad about pursuing her question into what was clearly uncomfortable territory, but it was in the air now and had momentum of its own. She could no more have hobbled her curiosity now than she could have defied gravity.

"I thought he was. I believed that for for three years." Andrea's gaze had come back into focus now, and she was concentrating all her attention on Hoffman as she spoke, as if her life depended on staring at him as hard as she could. "Turns out it was a lie."

"So he ran out on you and the baby?" said Julia, shooting the detective a quick glance of her own.

"No," said Andrea, through a difficult little smile that was there and gone again like smoke in a breeze. "He didn't know I was pregnant. I gotta give him that much credit, at least."

It did not sound to Julia as if Andrea genuinely wished to give Hoffman any credit at all, and indeed, the tone of her voice was rimed with bitterness like poisoned honey.

"What are you gonna do about this?"

Andrea looked down for a second and flexed her fingers, beating a short, senseless tattoo on the table top with her badly bitten nails before raising her head once more and pinning the young woman with the coolest look to which she'd ever found herself subject.

"Why are you asking?" she said, and now, at last, there was a sliver of broken glass in her voice. "'Cause I gotta tell you, honey, if I'm not mistaken by what I see in your eye, I'm lookin' at someone fixin' to make the same stupid mistake I did. We've only known one another a couple weeks, sure, but that's long enough for me to speak plain. I only knew Mark for three days, and that was _more_ than long enough to know I shoulda run the other way.

"So," she went on, lowering her voice to a throaty purr and leaning in so close that her breath fanned Julia's cheek, "I'm givin' you the same advice I once chose to ignore. Stay away from that man, as far away as you can. You don't know the first goddamn thing about what he's capable of, and for that, I envy you."

Julia drew back now, leaning away from that quiet but persistent litany, but it seemed that Andrea had spoken her piece in its entirety. She continued to study the younger woman for a second or two more, seconds that felt like hours, and then this vigil was interrupted by the sound of a soft hiccup from the next room, followed shortly by a thin wail. Andrea's jaw shifted minutely, and for a second she looked as though she were about to deliver a parting shot; then she merely shoved her chair back and stalked away from the table to see to her child.

Julia sat in dumbfounded silence for a moment, feeling humiliation prickle at her cheeks with the birth of a rising flush, then cleared her throat and returned her attention to the table to see everyone else averting their gaze, almost in unison. Now beyond mere mortification and, worse, not knowing exactly why, she rose from the table herself and pushed through the door, blundering out into the whispering shadows at the front of the terminal. The door swung closed behind her, cutting off the low light from the lounge, and with this she was submerged instead in the watery light of the moon, almost full now, surfing now and then along the edges of thin streamers of silver cloud in an otherwise flawless sky.

The only other company she now had were the cicadas, scratching out their chorus tunelessly and mindlessly in the distant scrub, and she straightened her back and wandered away from the terminal, crossing the small parking lot and trudging over the cracked surface of the access runway as the gloom gathered around her. She stopped in the middle of that bleak, whitewashed expanse and kicked at a loose stone in a sudden fit of petulance, hearing it skitter away into the long grass on the far side of the strip, and then simply hung her head, breathing hard through nose for a moment.

A small noise violated her self-inflicted quietude, and for a second even the busy crickets seemed to stop, momentarily stilled by the sudden sound, before beginning to pipe once more. Some way behind her, the door of the terminal had opened and closed. Julia had fully expected Philip to come looking for her, but she was in no mood to deal with the priest's seemingly endless supply of forbearance at that point, so she ignored the soft crackle of footsteps behind her and simply raised her chin to the sky, allowing the moonlight to drop onto her face like weightless pearls and make mirrors of her eyes.

The person behind her was closer now, and their steps slowed as they approached her, as if they were stalking prey. That metaphor sent an icy trickle through Julia's brain and down her spine, adding to the physical chill of the desert night on her bare arms and shoulders, and she finally spun around as a rising breeze lifted her hair around her neck, fluttering through it for a second and whipping it across her face before dying away as quickly as it had arisen.

She saw who had joined her, took a short step back, and said, "Oh..."


	7. Chapter 7

There was a short but very awkward pause, and then Julia felt the tension in her muscles unwind.

"Sorry," she said, tripping over her voice a little as she spoke. "I thought you were Philip."

Hoffman grunted softly, but this flat, non-committal sound, coupled with the fact that that his scars made his expression almost impossible to interpret with any degree of accuracy, rendered him an eerily blank slate. She glanced off to the side as she heard a muted noise in the distance, but it was only routine activity from the guard change at the barracks, almost two hundred yards to the south of them and the focus of what might very well have been the only artificial light in the whole state; were it not for this small oasis of sound and sight, she thought, she and the detective could well have been the only two people on earth.

Julia surfaced from this drawn-out thought to see that Hoffman was still regarding her indifferently, hands hanging loose at his sides. It was the casual nature of this silent appraisal that quickly began to prick at her, so she spoke up once more solely in order to put words between them.

"Andrea was just telling me –"

"I can guess what she said, thanks," Hoffman told her, abruptly. "That's not why I came out here. I'm going to take a look around the town."

Her jaw sagged a little. Within the confines of the base, surrounded on all sides as it was by steel chain link fence and patrolled by heavily armed soldiers, there was little to fear any more. Beyond that outpost of civilisation, however, Winslow lay in ruins for the most part, and where it wasn't crawling with walkers, there were feral dogs to take into consideration as well and some had been known to attack. Going there even in broad daylight was risky; the desert night had fallen quickly, however, and Hoffman's suggestion seemed to her to be little short of suicidal.

"You're totally crazy," she said, neatly summing up this thought process. She'd not meant to speak so bluntly and especially not to someone as ill-tempered as the detective, but at the same time, she was hard put to think of a gentler response. If he was struck by her statement, however, he didn't show it, and it occurred to Julia that it probably wasn't the first time he'd heard it said.

"I don't think the guards are gonna let you out the gate," she added, but half-heartedly, in the face of the decidedly calculating smile that was now surfacing on his face.

"Who said I was using the gate?" he asked, and then simply set his shoulders and walked past her, heading for the fence on the other side of the runway. Beyond that, she knew, lay the old US Route 66 and, past that, the outskirts of the town. None of this was visible in the darkness, however, and Julia's heart skipped a little in her chest as she watched Hoffman reach the fence and spring, catching his fingers in the steel links and scaling it with insolent ease. Once he'd done so, however, he paused, craning his neck and looking down at her with a challenging gleam in his eye as the breeze drew a lick of hair across his cheek.

"Coming?" he asked, and then, without waiting for a response, simply dropped off the top of the fence and disappeared into the gloom on the far side. She heard him pushing his way through the shoulder-high brush for a moment, and then the soft crackle of leaves died away entirely. Julia released her breath all at once and turned back to look at the terminal. There was nobody else in sight, and aside from the dull glow of the candlelight through the milky windows, there was nothing to indicate the slightest sign of life. She swung back again, eyed the fence for a second and then reaching a decision that suddenly owed precious little to a conscious appraisal of the risks involved, jogged over to the fence and started climbing.

Hoffman hadn't gone far, and didn't seem to be in any hurry, as Julia found him crossing the railway tracks without looking around him. His stride faltered a little as he heard her coming up behind him, but that was the only response he issued until she finally drew level, at which point he reached into his pocket and extracted a jack-knife. He prised the blade out with a _click_ and handed it to her without a word. She took it automatically, and then frowned, matching step with him as best she could.

"What's this for?"

"How the fuck did you survive this long?" he said, contemptuously. "There's gonna be walkers out there. What were you planning to do – talk them to death?"

Julia felt her temper stir like a snake, but merely closed her fingers tight on the handle of the knife instead as she reconsidered her intended outburst.

"I know that," she said, deliberately. "But if it's so dangerous, why are _you_ going?"

"I'm bored and I'm pissed off," he told her, without looking around. "In my case, that's a bad combination, so if you wanna know why I'm going looking for trouble, it's because I enjoy it. Simple as that."

"What's got you so pissed off?" she went on, knowing that this was a thread at which she shouldn't be pulling, but her curiosity about the man was by now scaling previously unexpected heights and she found herself quite powerless to rein it in.

"People keep asking me dumb questions," said Hoffman. Julia glanced up at his face, but it was too dark to see his expression. There had been the softest note of amused sarcasm in his voice; not much, but enough to tell her that she wasn't going to get any further with her queries, at least not for the moment.

The detective had been moving quietly but quickly, but now he pulled up sharp and waved a hand in the air to force silence on Julia, too. She halted both her feet and her mouth at once and then, acting on a sudden instinct for self-preservation, inched into Hoffman's shadow. After a few seconds, though, she craned her neck around him and took in the scene in front of them.

They were standing at a wide intersection downtown, and though most of the buildings on both sides of the street were now nothing more than piles of glass and bricks, some had managed to remain standing against the onslaught of the firestorm that had ripped the town apart. These lent plenty of deep shadows to an otherwise open, moonlit panorama, but even as hard as she strained to listen, Julia could hear nothing.

"What's the problem?" she hissed.

"_Quiet,_" muttered Hoffman, and then slipped away from her, sliding into the narrow space between two buildings. Julia started after him, almost stumbling over her own feet in sudden confusion, but he simply raised his palm in her direction, indicating that she should stay put, before melting into the shadow entirely.

Perhaps ten seconds passed, during which she heard nothing more besides the distant _yip-yip_ of a coyote, and then, a low scrape and shuffle, barely audible even in the grip of a silence so thick she could feel it close on her ears like cheesecloth. Then, in the monochrome stretch of the road ahead, a narrow shape detached itself from the irregular angle of shadow cast by a burned-out SUV and inched its way towards her, sidling left or right now and then but ultimately keeping its course. Julia's knuckles whitened in fright, and it was only this that reminded her that she was still clutching the knife Hoffman had given her. She raised it a little, but her hand was shaking badly now and she lowered her arm once more and, instead, tottered back a few steps.

The walker was no more than ten paces from her now, and she let loose a soft squeal of horror as she saw that its lower abdomen was torn open and most of its viscera were either damaged or missing, revealing a glimpse of yellow vertebrae at the back of the dry, hollow cavity in its guts.

By the time Julia had managed to drag her gaze back up to the creature's face and meet its rheumy eyes, it was reaching for her with fingers that were no more than brittle bone cloaked in equally frail skin, and she shied away, but then the creature stayed the inexorable advance of its hand and, broadcasting something like puzzlement, swung its head to the right.

It met the blade of Hoffman's ice pick coming the other way, and Julia staggered back with a shrill, airless gasp as the detective clamped his hand on the back of the thing's neck and drove the weapon even further into its eye socket, increasing the angle until he heard the point of the blade tear through the roof of the orbit with a dull crack and, finally, spear the walker's brain. He seemed content to wait for his victim to stop twitching before he released his hold and withdrew the ice pick but, as soon as he had done so, the skeletal form crumpled at once, its fine-haired skull knocking on the road as it fell.

Julia felt tears on her cheek and the point of her chin even though she'd been unaware of their advent, and she wiped these away with the back of her hand before Hoffman turned to face her, not wanting him to see that particular indignity even though she had no such control over the quiver in her legs or the near-hysterical catch in her breath, both of which must have been just as telling.

"You..." she began, but the word emerged as a raw croak and she coughed and tried again. "You used me as bait?"

"A diversion," said Hoffman, with a disinterested shrug, as he wiped the blade on the hem of his coat before stowing it in a pocket. "Get over it. You could have killed it yourself, anyway."

"But I never –" she began, and then bit back the rest of that sentence, but far too late. The truth was already reflected in the detective's face.

"You never killed a walker before. That figures," he added, scathingly, his lip curling slightly. "Now why don't you do us both a favour and haul your pampered little Valley Girl ass back to the base before the padre wonders where you are. It's way past your bedtime."

He turned on his heel before Julia could even react, let alone respond, and vanished into the shadows once more.

* * *

><p>"How did you cope with a baby in all this?"<p>

Diana hadn't intended to ask that particular question at all, and she was aware that she'd probably phrased it badly, notwithstanding that there probably _was_ no tactful way to put it. However, she'd long since run out of less awkward topics of conversation and was by now simply trying to avoid discussing her own recent history, which would only lead to even more difficult questions, this time aimed at her.

If she was bothered by the clumsy query, though, Andrea didn't display any sign of such; she merely looked painfully tired, and kept running a hand over her eyes every now and again. She eventually drew a deep breath and composed a reply.

"I gave birth in the back room of a drugstore in Joliet," she said, through a sigh. "We was on the run again right after, 'cause the smell of blood attracted walkers. So I did what I had to, that's all. A dozen times every day, just what I had to. Aaron, he never cried too much, at least, which helped." Andrea rubbed at her eyes yet again, as if even this short recital had exhausted her, and seemed to lose the thread of the conversation as a result.

"It wouldn't have made any difference, you know," said Diana, and once again the words had escaped her grasp before she could think them through properly.

"What wouldn't?"

"If we'd stayed with you, I mean."

"Hell, I know _that_," said Andrea, wearily. "I just...look, Diana, fact is _you're_ the one I just don't get," she went on, turning over her shoulder before she did so, making sure that they were alone. Diana cast a glance around the room herself. The two of them were sat by the remains of the fire as it settled in the grate, and the only other people in sight were Tony's twin daughters, who were busy fussing over Nero on the far side of the lounge. The dog was rolled over on his back, hind legs kicking sporadically as the girls scratched his belly, and he looked to be having more fun than he'd had in months. Diana smiled warmly, but by the time she turned back to the conversation, this good-humoured expression had faded.

"In what way?" she asked, trying to buy some time.

"You hated Mark, anyone could see that. So why'd y'all run off with him?"

"I was a stupid, angry, frightened kid back then," said Diana, picking her words with far more care now. "I hated everyone and everything and I was looking for someone to blame, that's all."

"Someone to blame for what?"

"My mother leaving, my father dying, the country being overrun by the living dead? Take your pick," said Diana. "Yes, I might have had bigger issues than your average teen, but I still reacted in basically the same way, by trying to prove that I was a grown-up when in reality, that couldn't have been further from the truth."

"Don't bullshit me, please," said Andrea, levelly. "I know who your papa was and what he did. What I can't figure out is where _you _fit into it all."

Diana almost laughed at the enormity of the insinuation. Instead, she exhaled smoothly and calmly and closed her eyes for a second before replying.

"Andrea," she said, carefully and deliberately, "I was only eight years old when John Kramer tore my family apart for the sake of teaching my father a lesson in perspective. I didn't have anything to do with that and I didn't have anything to do with what my dad became afterwards. He didn't come back the same, and I don't just mean physically. I knew what he was doing, but I still loved him, so I kept my mouth shut. That was my only involvement. And that's the whole truth."

The moment following this speech should have been perfectly solemn, but the short silence was interrupted by a furious scrabble of claws on the clay tiles as Nero righted himself with very little elegance and padded over to his mistress, nuzzling his nose into her hand. Diana stroked the dog's head without looking down and waited, patiently, for the other woman's reaction.

"Okay," said Andrea, at last. "But you'll understand if I still think this whole situation is damn weird?"

Diana nodded. "Understood," she said. "If you want my final confession, I ran after Hoffman because he's the last piece of my past. Not a very nice piece, sure, but he's all I have left and he's better than nothing."

"And he's been treatin' you okay?" asked Andrea, though Diana could see something extraordinarily fretful in the woman's eyes and knew that there was another implication there, couched in words she knew Andrea wouldn't say out loud in a million years.

"You might not believe me when I say this," she said, gently, "but he does have _some_ honour, and that's something he'd never do. If you wanna know the truth, he's actually been pretty protective." Diana paused, smiled ruefully at an old memory, debated briefly with herself and decided to voice it. "When I was fifteen, we hooked up with another group of survivors for a few days. One of the guys started hitting on me so Hoffman broke his arm in two places."

Andrea sat back, her spine ramrod straight, and for a heartbeat her expression was totally opaque. Then, against all expectation, she softened and slumped on the arm of the couch, leaning her head on one hand, though she continued to study Diana with some degree of wary apprehension writ across her face.

"Maybe I got him all wrong," she said, unexpectedly.

"No, you got him right, all we're talking about here is isolated incidents and a couple of technicalities," said Diana, calmly. "I'm not trying to convince you the guy's a saint, because he isn't. But he_ is _a survivor, because that's all he's ever been."

"And what about you?"

"I'm a survivor, too," said Diana. "I learned from the best, after all."

"So, I just gotta ask," said Andrea, and now a look of slightly shameful curiosity flitted across her features. "How'd he lose that eye?"

Hoffman stepped between them like a wraith, grinned mirthlessly and then cocked his head at Diana.

"This stupid bitch shot me in the face," he said.


	8. Chapter 8

Diana started, sitting bolt upright as she watched a look of incredulous horror break across Andrea's face, and thought quickly.

"It was an accident," she said, sharply, then directed a brief, narrow glare at Hoffman, which he shrugged off and then slumped into a chair. She watched him examine his fingers for a moment, and even in the low light it was clear that there were one or two small smears of blood in the hollows of his knuckles, but she eventually elected not to draw attention to this.

"No," he said, through the remains of that nasty grin. "It was your lousy aim."

"You had a walker on your back, dickhead. What was I supposed to do?"

"You were standing four fucking feet away and you still missed."

"I got the walker, didn't I?"

"Yeah, and I got a bitch of a makeover."

"Shit," said Diana, sitting back, now smirking broadly in spite of her ire. "Six months and you can't let it go, can you?"

"Sure I can, as long as I get to keep what's left of my face."

Hoffman started to deliver another retort, but this was interrupted by a brief snort of laughter, and they both turned to look at Andrea, who smothered her amusement with some difficulty.

"Arguin' like an old married couple," she said, dryly. "Cute."

This unlikely moment of solidarity was interrupted by Daryl, who joined Andrea on the couch and squeezed her shoulder.

"Aaron's asleep," he said, and then – Diana noticed – cast a wary eye over Hoffman. "Oh, there's a couple more walkers outside. Rick's dealin' with 'em."

As if on cue, there was a distant _crack_. Andrea jerked herself upright once more, her eyes widening, and didn't seem to relax until she heard the second shot ring out.

Though she'd yet to voice her feelings on the matter, Diana was deeply concerned at this new behaviour on the walkers' part. It wasn't the first time she'd seen it; over the last few months there had been several occasions when they'd seen walkers that did nothing but stand and stare, which was one of the reasons Hoffman had kept them on the move as regularly as possible. It wasn't unusual, and in truth the walkers tended toward the mindless except when they were on the hunt, but these were different. As outlandish – and chilling – a thought as it was, it was almost as if they were carrying out some kind of surveillance.

"Didn't it occur to you to worry about them?" asked Hoffman. Diana looked around, startled, wondering if he'd read her mind, but he was addressing the others.

"Not too much," said Daryl, and there was the softest song of defensiveness in his voice. "Why?"

"Because Sidney was right," said Hoffman. "By my estimate, based on the number of corpses we've been seeing around since the start of spring, at least eighty per cent of them are either dead or dying of cellular degeneration in the brain stem. That still leaves us with about sixty million healthy walkers, though, which I think we can assume are converging on any population centre they find and then just watching it. I'm merely suggesting," he finished, with the ghost of a smirk, "that it might be a good idea to keep a close eye on them since they're starting to display some fairly advanced tactical behaviour."

"Tactical?" echoed Daryl, with a drop of scorn. "They just stand there and take a bullet. Ain't nothin' tactical about that."

The fire crackled in the grate as it settled, and in the wake of this, the orange glow brightened a little. Hoffman leaned forward, and the firelight picked out the hollows and creases in his face, making him look little short of demonic. When he was sure he had everyone's attention, he cracked a grim smile, adding an extra dimension to this impression.

"You don't think so?" he said, softly. "Then you should have taken a look around the town, because I did. The walkers you're seeing are the weak ones. They're working together and they're sending the expendable members of the pack over here now and then to test your defences."

"Are you fucking kiddin' me?" said Daryl, his eyes widening slightly.

"Do I look like I'm kidding?" asked Hoffman, angling his head dangerously. "This base isn't gonna be safe for much longer unless we can persuade the Brits to carry out a little pest control around here." With this said, he stood and straightened his cuffs before casting a glance around at the others. "Think about it," he added, and then walked away as they stared after him.

Diana had been sitting with her mouth hanging loose throughout this exchange, but now she clamped her lips together and leapt to her feet, running after the detective. She caught up with him in the corridor that led to the back offices, took hold of his arm and stepped around him to block his path.

"You left the base?" she asked, glaring up at him.

"Given what I found out," he said, returning her accusing stare with a minimum of effort, "it looks like it was the smart thing to do. Until that town's been mopped up, this place isn't a refuge, it's a fucking trap."

"Well, you'd know," she said, although she regretted this acidic comment almost immediately, and then shook her head slightly to clear her thoughts. "I suppose you're right," she admitted, "but can we please communicate a little better? I would have gone with you if you'd told me. In case you hadn't noticed, we're not very popular around here for various reasons, so we'd better stick together."

When Hoffman didn't respond immediately, Diana released her grip on his arm and stepped back a pace to study him a little better. It struck her, in that second, that this was probably the most protracted conversation she'd ever held with him, since he was a naturally taciturn man who'd only taken this facet of his personality to greater heights since they'd been on the run together.

"You never answered my question," he said, throwing her off balance.

"What question?" she asked.

"I asked you why we're here."

Diana glanced off to the side for a moment as she sought for words, aware that she risked presenting her deepest vulnerabilities to someone with a well-established reputation for exploiting such things to his own advantage. Then, deciding that in some respects the detective probably knew her well enough by now, she composed a reply and caught his eye once more.

"I want a normal life," she said, quietly. "Can you understand? For the last ten years my life's revolved around Jigsaw. I didn't get to go to my senior prom, spend hours on the phone to my girlfriends, take driver's ed or graduate high school. Between John, and my dad, and the walkers, and now _you_, I think I've paid my dues. I can't get back everything I missed out on, but I can at least try. Do you get that?"

"You think that's going to make it all better?" asked Hoffman, raising a faintly derisory eyebrow at her. Diana didn't rise to this, but she nonetheless set her jaw before reacting to him.

"Actually, I do," she said, evenly. "And though I'm sure it surprises you to hear this and I'm probably out of my mind, I thought I'd try to help you, too."

Hoffman laughed, and to Diana's bewilderment, it wasn't the cool, mocking laugh she'd long been accustomed to hearing from him. He sounded, for once, honestly and pleasantly amused. She frowned as he leaned his shoulder against the wall and regarded her curiously.

"You sure about that?" he asked.

"What do you mean?"

"As you so elegantly reminded me this afternoon," he said, in tones coated with irony, "I killed an awful lot of people without thinking twice about any of it. I've never given anyone the slightest reason to give me a second chance, you least of all," he went on, the irony descending into undisguised sarcasm as he looked her up and down with an economical turn of his head, "but for some reason, you did. I guess I forgot to ask why."

"I had my reasons," she told him. "Don't make me reconsider them now. Look," she went on, through a weary sigh, "you have a clean slate. It's time to put society back together. Do you want to be a part of it or not?"

"That depends. Is it gonna be any less fucked up than the last one?"

"Jesus," said Diana, with a harsh laugh. "You don't give up without a fight, do you?"

He pushed himself away from the wall and took a step toward her. Diana's reflexes took over at that point and she backed away, but there was little room left in the narrow passage and she found the cool brick pressed against her shoulders. She started to speak, but found Hoffman's fingers closing on her chin, and then he was lifting her gaze to meet his own, which was, suddenly, quite deadly.

"No, I don't," he said, softly. "I told you once, a long time ago, that I wasn't gonna be your babysitter. I won't deny you've impressed me, kiddo, but I'm going to go back on what I said just long enough to give you a piece of advice: don't trust anyone."

"I don't understand what..."

It was no use. Her voice lost all impetus in the face of Hoffman's fixed stare, which was no less intimidating for the loss of an eye. He studied her for a few long seconds more, then released his hold on her, hunched his shoulders and disappeared into the gloom at the end of the corridor without looking back.

* * *

><p>"What are we gonna do?"<p>

Andrea hadn't stopped turning the night's conversation over in her mind, but it had taken her some time to reach any kind of conclusion. It was long past midnight and she had been trying for sleep, but as Daryl spoke, she turned over on the mattress and looked up into his concerned gaze. He looked twice as tired as she felt, and his eyes were rimmed in red.

"I don't know, hon," she said, raising herself onto her elbow and brushing a wisp of hair off his forehead, her fingers moving slowly and tenderly. "We'll ask Rick in the mornin'. If anyone's gonna speak to the captain about this, then it better be him. He ain't about to listen to any of the rest of us, but he respects a uniform."

"Do you trust him?" asked Daryl, his voice sinking even lower than before. Andrea watched his eyes track back and forth over her face as he spoke, and he seemed to be growing both restless and uneasy.

"You mean Rick?" she said, although she knew perfectly well that he didn't.

"No. I mean Detective Hoffman."

Andrea dropped her gaze briefly. She hadn't intended to, and she knew that Daryl would read a wealth of subtext into it, much of which would be accurate.

"About _this_, yes," she admitted, looking back up at him. "I can't say I hadn't been wonderin' about the watchers myself, and whether or not he did go look for himself it's the only explanation that makes any sense at all."

She waited for him to reply, but all at once it looked as if Daryl had something else on his mind, and he glanced away from her for a moment and cleared his throat softly. When he returned his attention, there was the tiniest of creases about his mouth; a very small and slightly sad smile.

"I love you," he said, and though his voice was low it was also perfectly steady. "Guess I never said that before now, but I wanted you to know. It don't matter if you don't feel the same," he added, and it was this last statement, most of all, that twisted the knife of guilt in Andrea's guts. She looked at his earnest expression long and hard before answering him.

"I love you, too," she said, knowing that even if it didn't represent the truth, it was at least an expression of her wishes; and then, not wanting to subject either of them to any more painful aversions from honesty, she moved closer, locked her arm around Daryl's neck and kissed him. Some part of her had half expected reluctance, but he responded at once, opening his mouth to hers and gliding his hand up the warm plane of her belly, tracing his touch over her skin before cupping her breast and kneading it gently until her nipple protruded, rose-pink and proud, between his fingers.

Andrea moaned softly and wriggled closer until she felt his swelling erection pressing into the soft flesh of her upper thigh. Her pulse quickened and skipped a little, and she reached down between their locked bodies and curled her fingers around his shaft, stroking him gently at first but then with increasing friction and vigour, until he gasped into her mouth in the throes of a violent shudder. She pulled away a little then, and released her hold on his cock and waited for that convulsion to pass. There were patches of raw colour on his face now, and as he subsided by degrees, Andrea saw that he was looking at her a little curiously.

She'd never been so brazen with Daryl before, and it was true that in spite of both appearance and temperament, he'd proven to be a remarkably affectionate and thoughtful lover who'd delighted her with his selfless attentions and almost reverent kisses. It wasn't him who'd changed; Andrea knew that the difference now was hers and hers alone, and she knew why it was, but she was nonetheless powerless to control herself. A beast inside her that had lain dormant for more than three years was stirring in its slumber, and wouldn't be sated so easily once it awoke.

This much coherent thought done with, she whined softly and wrapped him in her arms, sinking her nails into the skin of his shoulders and biting down on the side of his neck; not hard, but with febrile urgency, murmuring against his flesh. He loosed an unintelligible, animal noise, and she parted her legs, hooked one knee over his hip and drew him tight against her, lifting her hips from the mattress and grinding against his erection as she felt her juices begin to flow.

"Hurt me," she said, close to his ear, her voice velvet and her lips trembling. She felt his muscles stiffen against her, but this time, for a different reason. He drew back and untangled her arms from around his neck, frowning minutely.

"I can't do that," he told her, gently but hoarsely. "I'm sorry."

"I need it," she said, her voice still low but pleading.

"Andrea..." said Daryl, uneasily, and now his brow furrowed with concern as he retreated a little further in the face of her insistence. "What's gotten into you?"

She struggled up now and reached out for him, her hands shaking desperately, but he took her wrists in a firm grip and held her fast, keeping her at bay.

"Please," she breathed, her bare breasts heaving as she drew several deep breaths for composure. "Just this once, I'm beggin' you. I want you to hurt me."

"I just ain't that kinda man," he said, softly.

Andrea felt the burden of self-imposed shame colouring her cheek, and she looked away to forestall an accompanying tear. Daryl loosed his hold on her wrists now and lay back down, drawing her with him, and she curled up close at his side and laid her head on his shoulder, delving her hand down to clasp his.

He squeezed her fingers and then turned to press a warm kiss to the top of her head, but said nothing more.


End file.
